Consumption lies at the heart of the greatest challenge facing humankind today: the issue of environmental sustainability. It is a multi-faceted theme that is rich with creative potential. We are all consumers. We have invented new forms of building, industrial production, farming and energy; we have emptied the seas and ravaged the land in our relentless drive to satisfy our unquenchable desires. We have built vast empires based on luxury goods, creating demand for essentials that we didn’t know we needed. We have sustained this through the sometimes thoughtless exploitation of the world’s poorest people.

This will be the fourth occasion the Prix Pictet has visited Dublin. Founded by the Pictet Group in 2008, the Prix Pictet has rapidly established itself as the world’s leading prize in photography and sustainability. The award aims to uncover outstanding photography applied to confront the most pressing social and environmental challenges of today.

Prix Pictet Talk:
5.00pm on Thursday 9 April 2015
Michael Benson, Director, Prix Pictet and Amanda Wilkinson, the co-director of the Wilkinson Gallery, and gallerist for artist Laurie Simmons will discuss the Prix Pictet Prize.
To book a place contact info@galleryofphotography.ie

Kerlin Gallery is pleased to present More like living than life itself, an exhibition of new work by David Godbold, combining new paintings with ‘drastically altered’ older works, some dating back more than twenty years. In revisiting these, Godbold breaks an unspoken rule of painting – disrupting the sanctity of the finished surface, essentially ‘correcting’, redacting, corrupting or vandalising his own art and calling into question the notion or potential of artistic resolution.

This new body of work also marks a shift in focus within Godbold’s practice. Long preoccupied with mimetics, or visually depictive representation, this new work sees his attention move to diegetics, storytelling managed by an authorial creation of points of view, either interior or exterior narration. Thickly brushed, gestural oil slicks are applied over the top of Godbold’s fine ink work, delicately rendered with OO brushes, while a series of sketched-on frames or ‘panel borders’ have the potential either to isolate or to unify co-existing narrative elements.

Largely abstract, these new additions tip the balance away from the depicting line or ‘object’ as the focus of painting, and towards the negative space that surrounds it. Background becomes just as important as foreground, knowledge is supplanted by uncertainty, objects are cast adrift in a sea of colour, shape, gesture and fragments of text.

David Godbold first rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as one half of the duo Godbold & Wood. He relocated to Ireland at the beginning of the 1990s, where he continues to live and work. A formative residency at PS1/MoMA, New York in 2000 saw him begin pairing classically articulated ink drawings with very contemporary, irreverent ‘captions’, forming image/texts – a practice that has remained at the core of his work. Clashing past with present, highbrow with lowbrow, Godbold’s best-known work bridges old master painting with contemporary, populist forms of media such as political cartoons, comics, children’s colouring books and illustrator’s compendiums.

Recent solo shows include ‘Redemptive Facticity’ and ‘Loadstar’, Weingrüll, Karlsruhe, Germany and Artinternational, Istanbul. Godbold’s work was included in a museum survey show of text in visual arts since 1960, ‘Sign. Language. Images’ at the Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe in 2014, and in group projects at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Von der Heydt-Museum, Germany in 2011; the Barbican, London, 2010, and in the Dave Eggers-curated exhibition ‘Lots of Things Like This’ at apexart, New York, 2008. His work is represented in the collections of Trinity College, Dublin; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; City Bank, New York, and numerous other public and private collections worldwide.

Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is delighted to present former Turner Prize nominee Stephen McKenna’s latest exhibition, Perspectives of Europe. This unique exhibition features works created throughout McKenna’s career, focusing specifically on cityscapes, parks and trees.

Perspectives of Europe opens to the public at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane on 23rd July. The artist’s deep interest in the structures which underlie the natural and built environment is displayed thematically in groups of paintings depicting classical columns, city ports and specific close-ups of verdant foliage.

Stephen McKenna has worked in several European cities and currently lives in County Carlow. This selection of paintings, from the 1980s to the present, charts the artist’s experience of working in urban and rural environments and reveals his response to the cultural histories that form their identities.

Director, Barbara Dawson, said: “His is a keen and original vision which is informed by his metier –the millennia of Western mythology and its history. Alongside his paintings of cities, in this exhibition there is a focus on the artist’s love of nature in his depictions of foliage. He delights in opening his and our eyes to the poetry contained in their painterly representation ordinary and extraordinary in their compositional structures”.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and features both national and international loans. It is open to the public until 4th October 2015. A fully illustrated catalogue is on sale in the bookshop detailing all works in both exhibitions.

Aleana Egan’s exhibition provides an intimate encounter with a single new sculpture. The form of a canopy suspended above low constructions on the floor gives some sense of the oppositions often found in the artist’s elusive work; traces of fleeting memories and interactions between people are revealed intuitively through the colour, texture and weight of the materials used.

Egan’s work is in part an attempt to communicate the mood and atmosphere that she finds in films, books and artworks. 'The Dressmaker', a painting by Margaret Clarke, from which the artist drew much of the spirit of her new sculpture, is included in the exhibition. 'A Letter to Three Wives', a 1949 film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz was also influential.

Aleana Egan’s solo show, day wears, took place at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in 2012. Her work was also included in our 2014 group exhibition, Dukkha. The Douglas Hyde Gallery would like to thank the artist, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, and the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, for their support of the exhibition.

Luigi Ghirri’s photographs can seem nostalgic, but they woudn’t have come across that way in the 1970s, when most of them were taken. He liked unremarkable places such as seaside resorts, amusement parks, farmhouses, tourist attractions, and nondescript city streets; he wasn’t drawn to anything particularly dramatic, nor did he invest them with strong feeling. Ghirri’s was an enigmatic vision of the everyday; he chose to make strange the ordinary, revealing life as a little empty and alienated but never especially unhappy or disturbing.

Although his deadpan images are apparently effortless, they are possessed of understated and puzzling complexity; beneath their calm surfaces there is a peculiar ambiguity that can be associated with the passing of time, and with doubt, humour, and mystery. Operating in a liminal space between realism and metaphysics - not unlike his Italian compatriots Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi - Ghirri quietly draws our attention to things, relationships, and ideas that most people don’t notice.

Luigi Ghirri (1943 - 1992) has received much acclaim for his photographs in the past decade. In 2008, the Aperture Foundation produced the first book on his work in English, and his work was featured in the 2011 and 2013 Venice Biennales.

The Douglas Hyde Gallery warmly thanks Adele Ghirri and Matthew Marks Gallery for their support of the exhibition.

On the approach of the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising and the subsequent establishment of the new Republic, IMMA presents El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State. The exhibition reflects on the artistic and cultural community that gave voice to a new image for the emerging state and a visual language for its politics, placing this local reflection within a broader global consideration of the role of artists in the imagination of emergent states of the early 20th century and a contemporary reflection on the task of the artist in relation to civil society.

The exhibition brings together a significant body of works from the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven by El Lizzitsky (1890–1941), one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, shown here for the first time in Ireland. El Lizzitsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution; for him, the construction of the Soviet Union meant the opportunity to break away from traditional constraints. He used it to develop visions of a collective aesthetic of the new world, which he then embodied in his artworks.

These works, including an important body of his noted “Proun” series, are shown in the context of archive material referencing the work of Irish nationalist poet and writer Alice Milligan (1865–1953) and her collaborator Maud Gonne (1866–1953). The exhibition explores their parallel visions of the activated artist central to the imagining of a new state. El Lissitzky and Milligan both envisaged their creative practices as tools for social and political change, although realising this through very different aesthetic languages and strategies. What becomes clear is the conviction and active participation in the task at hand: the artist as active in the formation of the new world order.

A contemporary counterpoint to the historical narrative is provided by the work of four artists—Rossella Biscotti, Núria Güell, Sarah Pierce and Hito Steyerl—whose work, in different ways, reflects on the position of the artist within contemporary society. Núria Güell and Rosella Biscotti directly address our position as individuals within the mechanics of the state, while Pierce questions the task of the artist (both past and present) in addressing any kind of cohesive experience in civil society. Hito Steyerl will exhibit two works, each of which reflect on the important history of the Russian Avant Garde while pointing towards more contemporary concerns within today’s digitised and militarised global context.

El Lissitzky: The Artist and the State brings to Ireland for the first time an extraordinary body of work by El Lissitzky—generously lent to IMMA by the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands—shown alongside archival material related to Alice Milligan and Maud Gonne’s theatrical tableaux, as well as newly commissioned and recent works by Rossella Biscotti, Núria Güell, Sarah Pierce and Hito Steyerl.

A full programme of talks and lectures accompanies the exhibition. Visit www.imma.ie for more information.

David Claerbout is a master of visual ambiguity, presenting scenes built from a complex association between photography, film and sound. Claerbout’s multiple video installation at Project Arts Centre will challenge conventions of exhibition-making, attempting to further our efforts to perceive what it is to exhibit while exhibiting.

This exhibition will show a reconstruction of Gretchen Bender’s seminal Total Recall (1987), bringing again to life her concept of ‘electronic theatre’.
A monumental 24-monitor multi-projection screen installation, Total Recall explores the accelerated image-flow of television and includes a multitude of images that surrounded the context of her work – corporate logos, military hardware, Hollywood film as well as commercials for consumer goods.
Image: Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987, exhibition view Tate Liverpool
With warm thanks to The Estate of Gretchen Bender and to Tate Liverpool.